This can be a useful way of dealing with needing more disk space, but it can also be risky.  Concatination is simple and convienent (when one disk gets full continue writeing on the next disk), but it also means if one of your physical drives fail, you loose all the data that is spanning all the drives!  There is no redundancy.  This technique is generally used in place of raid 1 (striping).  Sun Solstice has had this feature for a few years.  A better choice for volume managment is Veritas Volume Manager and File System.  It can actually resize partitions on the fly and has exelent redundancy.  I thought I heard they were going to make a Linux version.


Dusty

http://www.veritas.com/products/category/ProductDetail.jhtml?productId=filesystem
http://www.veritas.com/products/category/ProductDetail.jhtml?productId=volumemanagerunix



> 
> End Partitioning Hassles with LVM
> http://linux.org.mt/article/lvm
> 
> (excerps from the article)
> The ideal situation would be if hard disk storage were added and removed
> more or less like RAM: you simply add a new disk to your "hard disk pool"
> and get "x" megabytes of additional space on your filesystem. The space gets
> added to your existing directory tree instead of requiring you to create a
> new mount point and mount the new hard disk there.
> In Linux, this is the job of the Logical Volume Manager. With the LVM, you
> no longer have to worry about how much space each partition will contain. In
> fact, you may no longer have to worry about partitions at all. Instead of
> partitions and hard disks, you have logical volumes.
> 
> 
> SuSE Whitepaper on LVM
> http://www.suse.com/en/support/oracle/docs/lvm_whitepaper.pdf
> 
> Warren Togami
> warren@togami.com
> 
> 
> ---
> You are currently subscribed to luau as: dusty@sandust.com
> To unsubscribe send a blank email to $subst('Email.Unsub')

"Linux is for people who hate Windows. BSD is for 
people that love unix."